Odd Thomas: You Are Destined to Be Together Forever

Amid the dizzying rides, tantalizing games of chance, and fanciful attractions of a state fair, two teenage sweethearts on the cusp of life and love's pleasures find their way to a shadowy carnival tent brimming with curiosities. There, from the bizarre and enthralling Gypsy Mummy, a mechanized merchant of dreams and prognosticator of tomorrows, the young couple learns what fate promises for them. But fate, for Odd Thomas and Stormy Llewellyn, is something altogether different: full of dark corners, sharp edges, and things no seer or soothsayer could ever anticipate.

Fear Nothing

Christopher Snow is the best-known resident of 12,000-strong Moonlight Bay, California. This is because 28-year-old Chris has xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), a light-sensitivity so severe that he cannot leave his house in daylight, cannot enter a normally-lit room, cannot sit at a computer.

Watchers

From a top-secret government laboratory come two genetically altered life forms. One is a magnificent dog of astonishing intelligence. The other, a hybrid monster of a brutally violent nature. And both are on the loose....

From the Corner of His Eye

Bartholomew Lampion is born on a day of tragedy and terror that will mark his family forever. All agree that his unusual eyes are the most beautiful they have ever seen. On this same day, a thousand miles away, a ruthless man learns that he has a mortal enemy named Bartholomew. He embarks on a relentless search to find this enemy, a search that will consume his life. And a girl is born from a brutal rape, her destiny mysteriously linked to Barty and the man who stalks him.

Phantoms

They found the town silent, apparently abandoned. Then they found the first body strangely swollen and still warm. One hundred fifty were dead, 350 missing. But the terror had only begun in the tiny mountain town of Snowfield, California.

One Door Away from Heaven

In a dusty trailer park on the far edge of the California dream, Michelina wants to change the direction of her troubled life but can't find her way. When a new family settles into the rental trailer next door, Micky meets the young girl who will change her forever.

Life Expectancy

Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. As a violent storm rages outside the hospital, Rudy Tock spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers' waiting room and his dying father's bedside. It's a strange vigil made all the stranger when, at the very height of the storm's fury, Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the first and last time since his stroke.

The Silent Corner: A Novel of Suspense

"I very much need to be dead." These are the chilling words left behind by a man who had everything to live for - but took his own life. In the void that remains stands his widow, Jane, surrounded by questions destined to go unanswered...unless she does what all the grief, fear, confusion, and fury inside of her demand: find the truth, no matter what. There is no one else to speak for Jane's husband - or the others who have followed him into death at their own hands.

77 Shadow Street

Enter the world of the Pendleton: The original owner became a recluse - and was rumored to be more than half mad - after his wife and two children were kidnapped in 1896 and never found. The second owner suffered a worse tragedy in 1935, when his house manager murdered him, his family, and the entire live-in staff.... Craftsmen and laborers working on renovations disappear or go mad.... For years, the Pendleton is a happy place, until a bad turn comes again.... Voices in unknown languages are heard in deserted rooms....

Lightning

A storm struck on the night Laura Shane was born, and there was a strangeness about the weather that people would remember for years. But even more mysterious was the blond-haired stranger who appeared out of nowhere - the man who saved Laura from a fatal delivery. Years later - after another bolt of lightning - the stranger returned.

Strangers

A handful of people. From different backgrounds, living in different towns and cities across America, they had nothing in common - except fear. Deep in the heart of a sprawling desert, a dark memory called out to them, drawing them to the Tranquility Motel - where the terrifying truth was waiting.

The Face

He's Hollywood's most dazzling star, who is worshiped by millions and hated by one twisted soul. His existence is under siege as a series of terrifying, enigmatic "messages" breaches the security systems of his Bel Air estate. The boxes arrive mysteriously, one by one, at Channing Manheim's compound. Manheim's security chief, ex-cop Ethan Truman, is used to looking beneath the surface of things. But until he entered the orbit of a Hollywood icon, he had no idea just how slippery reality could be.

Sole Survivor

Sole Survivor unfolds at a heart-stopping pace, as a desperate chase and a shattering emotional odyssey lead Joe to a truth that will force him to reassess everything he thought he knew about life and death, a truth that, given the chance, will rock the world and redefine the destiny of humanity.

Darkness Under the Sun

There once was a killer who knew the night, its secrets and rhythms. How to hide within its shadows. When to hunt. He roamed from town to town, city to city, choosing his prey for their beauty and innocence. His cruelties were infinite, his humanity long since forfeit. But still... he had not yet discovered how to make his special mark among monsters, how to come fully alive as Death. This is the story of how he learned those things, and of what we might do to ensure that he does not visit us.

Midnight

In picturesque Moonlight Cove, California, inexplicable deaths occur, and spine-tingling terror descends to this "edge of paradise". Growing numbers of residents harbor a secret so dark it is sure to cost even more lives.

Intensity: A Novel

Past midnight, Chyna Shepherd, 26, gazed out a moonlit window, unable to sleep on her first night in the Napa Valley home of her best friend's family. Instinct proves reliable. A murderous sociopath, Edgler Forman Vess, has entered the house, intent on killing everyone inside. A self-proclaimed "homicidal adventurer", Vess lives only to satisfy all appetites as they arise, to immerse himself in sensation, to live without fear, remorse, or limits, to live with intensity.

The Taking

On the morning that will mark the end of the world they have known, Molly and Neil Sloan awaken to the drumbeat of rain on their roof. It has haunted their sleep, invaded their dreams, and now they rise to find a luminous silvery downpour drenching their small California mountain town. A strange scent hangs faintly in the air, and the young couple cannot shake the sense of something wrong.

The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

In the first book of this brilliant series, Stephen King introduces listeners to one of his most powerful creations: Roland of Gilead, The Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland tracks The Man in Black, encounters an enticing woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the boy from New York named Jake.

Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: They become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent; and while they sleep they go to another place.... The men of our world are abandoned, left to their increasingly primal devices. One woman, however, the mysterious Evie, is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse, Book 1

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets.

It

Welcome to Derry, Maine. It's a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real. They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But the promise they made 28 years ago calls them to reunite in the same place where, as teenagers, they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city's children.

Publisher's Summary

"The dead don't talk. I don't know why." But they do try to communicate, with a short-order cook in a small desert town serving as their reluctant confidant. Odd Thomas thinks of himself as an ordinary guy, if possessed of a certain measure of talent at the Pico Mundo Grill and rapturously in love with the most beautiful girl in the world, Stormy Llewellyn.

Maybe he has a gift, maybe it's a curse, Odd has never been sure, but he tries to do his best by the silent souls who seek him out. Sometimes they want justice, and Odd's otherworldly tips to Pico Mundo's sympathetic police chief, Wyatt Porter, can solve a crime. Occasionally they can prevent one. But this time it's different.

A mysterious man comes to town with a voracious appetite, a filing cabinet stuffed with information on the world's worst killers, and a pack of hyena-like shades following him wherever he goes. Who the man is and what he wants, not even Odd's deceased informants can tell him. His most ominous clue is a page ripped from a day-by-day calendar for August 15.

Today is August 14.

In less than twenty-four hours, Pico Mundo will awaken to a day of catastrophe. As evil coils under the searing desert sun, Odd travels through the shifting prisms of his world, struggling to avert a looming cataclysm with the aid of his soul mate and an unlikely community of allies that includes the King of Rock 'n' Roll. His account of two shattering days when past and present, fate and destiny converge is the stuff of our worst nightmares, and a testament by which to live: sanely if not safely, with courage, humor, and a full heart that even in the darkness must persevere.

What the Critics Say

"Once in a very great while, an author does everything right, as Koontz has in this marvelous novel....This is Koontz working at his pinnacle." (Publishers Weekly) "A curious mixture of whimsy, gentle humor, and horror...It is the casual weirdness on display here, rife with bodachs and other signs of a Vonnegut-style fancifulness, that gives Odd Thomas its principal appeal." (The New York Times) "This quirky and touching story of a 20-year-old short order cook with paranormal abilities is spun with stylistic grace by Dean Koontz, and read in an innocent, unaffected style by David Aaron Baker." (AudioFile)

Odd Thomas was a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing book. Never realized Dean Koontz had such a great sense of humor. Listened to every word while driving across the desert. Reader David Aaron Baker was fantastic. He became Odd Thomas, and as I totally suspended my disbelief, Odd Thomas became real.
Denise Kusel

It took me about an hour to get used to the different style, but once I did, I was hooked. Listened to this book in 2 sittings. Couldn?t put it down. This is definitively one of the few I will listen to again.

As a devoted Koontz fan, I downloaded this selection as soon as I saw it was available. This one knocked my socks off. With an economy of narration that should satisfy critics of previous, more descriptive works, Koontz pushes us relentlessly forward towards a potential catastophe with an urgency reminiscent of his earlier "Strange Highways". There is absolute faith and trust in the instincts and integrity of the hero and narrator of this tale, making the supernatural aspects of the story totally believable from the very beginning.
Koontz and Stephen King are often linked together as similar in writing styles and genre. I have had no luck in enjoying King, finding him gloomy, hostile and often vulgar. On the other hand, in spite of catastrophic happenings, Koontz finds hope, courage and devotion to man's responsibility to humanity as consistent themes in developing his stories. I will stick to Dean Koontz, and recommend this story as a place to start.

I bought 'Odd Thomas' on tape before a long 8 hour drive to a destination that neither my wife nor I were looking forward too. It was to be an unpleasant trip at best and I thought if I could get her hooked on a book-on-tape, I could get her mind off of dreadful things. I have been a Koontz fan for years and thought if 'Koontz' can't hook her, no one can. After the first 30 minutes, she put down her puzzle book and was listening with the enthusiasm of a young girl during story time at school. She was so captured ... I had to buy a tape player as soon as we arrived, so she could listen in our motel room.
Koontz has blended his skills into humor, horror and drama, like never before. He changes pace within the book, at just the right time. He brings the characters to life, right before your ears (eyes). 'Odd Thomas' is a joy to listen too and worth the time and money to invest in the audio or book. This puts Koontz in the arena of character development with Stephen King and the story-telling skills of such greats as James Patterson. It's the best of all worlds and I really think that anyone that gives it a read, won't be disappointed.
PS My 17 year old, 'never pick-up a book', son listened to it in just one day. He loved it too!

I was sort of expecting a supernatural thriller. And, while supernatural is definitely the context, I have to say that the story really ran more like a drama.

Character development was great. You'll feel an affinity with each character in the story.

This tale starts off with much more monologue than what I usually like. After a few chapters, it finally developed into dialog... though, it did continue venturing back into that first-person narrative. (It's told from Odd Thomas' perspective as the writer of the story.)

I like a lot of dialog. What can I say? Still, it works.

But, I think I would have rated it higher had my expectations been aligned with a drama instead of a thriller. Check that... I guess it still "thrills," but at a slower pace.

The reader, David Aaron Baker, did a wonderful job. Though, I do wish that his future works will see him develop more breadth in character voices. That said, I found him enjoyable to listen to.

If you like his books,you will love Odd Thomas. I have probable read a half dozen of his books, and I couldn't stop listening to this one. I just finished a trip and sat in the car in my driveway until it was over. You couldn't stay away from the last thirty minutes. Great!

Having read a few of his earlier works, I quickly grew weary Dean Koontz novels and by the time I started my fourth, I quit before finishing it. Several years (about 15 or so) have since passed and I decided to give him another try - especially after reading some of the reviews posted here.

I was very disappointed with Odd Thomas. The supernatural gimmick here seemed even more gimmicky than some of his older works, and the story itself was superficial and certainly not compelling. There was no taking the long way home, or lingering in my car in our driveway with this audio book.

I really tried hard to like this book, but I was actually glad when this book ended. Sorry Mr. Koontz .

The Path Between the Seas to The Great Bridge ~ Kagan's Peloponnesian War to Gaddis' Cold One ~ Mornings on Horseback to a River of Doubt ~ Tom to Huck ~ Lennie to Charley ~ Cadfael to Cross ~ Rhyme to Reacher ~ Blomkvist and Salander to Wallander and Wallander ~ Moving Cheese or Eating Frogs ~ On the Road and Into Thin Air ~ The End of History to A Short History of Everything to ... well ... everything else.

I picked the book because it was advertised as a departure from the author's usual approach to his characters. In this case, we are advised the central element involves communicating with the dead. While what is thus constructed as a story line starts out as intriguing, I soon got the idea Mr. Koontz wrote this book with tongue planted firmly in cheek. It is as if he wrote the book to exemplify for freshman composition students every imaginable literary gimmick available - over and over again. Late in the book, Koontz even goes to the extreme of repeating the same alliteration - and then a THIRD time, actually explaining to the reader that this is an alliteration!

Setting aside the matter of style, I found the story at least charming, and I did finish the book. Kudos to David Aaron Baker for a superlative narration. His rendition of the characters may be the best reason to listen to the book.